


and i don't want a never ending life (i just want to be alive while i'm here)

by queenfizzy



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: F/M, M/M, Michael has lived thousands of lifetimes, Stream of Consciousness, achievement hunter - Freeform, and he has his favorites, but he'll always find his family, i don't know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 08:52:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8095822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenfizzy/pseuds/queenfizzy
Summary: Staring up through the water at the fading light, feeling Gavin thrash next to him, pulling him up to air, he fades from this life into the next.
-
Michael Jones has lived thousands of lives, with thousands of different endings. No matter what, though - 
He will always find his family.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I don't... really know what I'm doing? This is unbetaed and has a weird flow, but I really like it. It's my first RT fic, so... hello! I'd love some feedback

In one lifetime, Michael’s a superhero. He’s tall and strong and not very likable, so he stays away from people, not really understanding why he needs companionship. He’s got his mother, that’s all he needs. He lives with her in the forest, hunting and fighting, enjoying the simple things. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have to, it would just disrupt the quiet. He’s Mogar the Warrior, raised by bears and ready to fight. He doesn’t need anyone else.

Then his mother disappears.

It’s astounding, how fast your life can change. He searches the forest far and wide, but eventually the forest ends. He’s never seen a city before. It’s huge, full of large buildings and loud noises and he hates it, but he hates the blue one and the green one the most. The citizens call them X-Ray and Vav, he just calls them annoying.

It’s a sad place where you take down one bad guy and get called a hero. He doesn’t know why the people can’t fight for themselves, but the first time a little girl comes up to him and tells him that Mogar is her hero a resolve squeezes his heart. He didn’t know this loud, bustling city a month ago, but now it’s his. No one’s going to terrorize it.

He forgets about his mission, momentarily. Finds joy in helping people and outsmarting the other two superheroes that prowl the streets. He knows they and their friends are looking into him, and wonders what they’re going to find. 

It’s irritating to be unable to talk, unable to articulate his thoughts in any matter at all, but he deals with it. Nods a lot, and lets his fists do most of the talking. He hates X-Ray so much - the guy is so jealous that it stopped being amusing and just became kind of sad. Vav is okay, though, he seems like a reasonably rational person even if he does have a funny accent and his voice and nose remind Mogar of a bird.

They burn down his house. Why? What did he do to them? It’s the reporter chick and the green one. Even Vav and Hilda set him on edge. At least the citizens like him, thank him. But then the Mad King reminds him of his mother, and he feels ashamed to have forgotten for this long. To have almost moved on.

The Mad King promises to help Mogar find his mother and destroy X-Ray and Vav. So Mogar breaks him out of prison and helps him reacquire Monarch Labs. It’s almost fun, all the fighting and bantering. But he can’t push the thought of his mother out of his head, not after that long period of distraction. So he helps The Mad King and watches as X-Ray and Vav fight. He wonders why X-Ray is so angry. True heroes save the innocent first, even if their own friends are at risk. Vav was doing the right thing.

But X-Ray evidently didn’t see it that way.  
The remorse comes later, settling heavy across his shoulders as he sees X-Ray with a rock, Vav doing okay on his own but not looking nearly as happy as he did with X-Ray by his side. It’s a weight, but one he’s willing to bear if it leads him to his mother. The only problem is that it doesn’t.

He gets impatient, argues with The Mad King and gets thrown in a hole for his trouble. Well, at least he found his mother. At least she’s proud of him. Then he’s hooked up to a machine and everything hurts, a blind, blistering feeling of just pain, pain, pain and it’s like something Mogar has felt before, but he can’t remember when, can’t think through the pain.

X-Ray and Vav are there, and The Mad King is talking, and someone hands him his sword. And they do it together, the three superheroes taking down the bad guy, just like it should be.

Things spiral from there. It comes down to a rainy night about fifteen years after he and the two super idiots came to an uneasy truce. There’s too many and it’s a hard decision - but not really, because the height of heroism and loyalty is sacrificing yourself for your friends. And he may tell himself he’s never been a hero, but he has always been loyal.

So he looks at X-Ray, who is climbing over the fence, and yells as loudly as he can, “Run!” and then, following after, a very quiet, “Goodbye.” 

When X-Ray nods and drops out of sight, Mogar knows that he understands.

It was a hard life and at times desperately lonely, like when he’d look at Vav (Gavin) and Ash and just wish - 

But it was one of his favorites.

~

In another, Michael’s a cat.

Which isn’t fair, because he just knows that at one point he hated cats. But he’s part cat and there’s nothing he can do about it, nothing but hiding his ears under a beanie and his tail in baggy jeans. Despite being accepted, there are places where hybrids are stared at, bullied. Michael’s town is one of them.

When he’s fifteen a senior tries to cut off his ears. He fends him off, but now there’s a permanent nick to remind Michael of how much everyone hates that side of him. And so he hides it, avoids strangers and becomes angry at the world.

He didn’t ask for this.

It’s years later and people still stare. He works a nine to five job as an electrician with a relatively kind boss and makes good money. Sometimes he makes videos on Youtube of himself yelling at video games. A little strange, but people seem to like it. Life goes on in a boring routine, and he leaves his fighting days behind him, thinks back often on the times when he didn’t have any qualms decking people who stared at his ears too long. 

He gets hired at Rooster Teeth because people apparently love watching him kill himself by getting upset at stupid games. He joins their gaming channel and watches as it grows into something amazing. Best of all - no one stares at him. Almost 45% of Rooster Teeth employees are hybrids as well. Achievement Hunter is full of them. His boss Geoff, a ram hybrid; his best friend Gavin, a lark hybrid; his other friends Jack, Ryan, and Ray, a lion, bull, and rabbit hybrid respectively. There’s also a red husky hybrid named Lindsay that Michael thinks he might be a little in love with, but that’s up to debate. At least it is until he starts dating her.

He stars in a movie, ears and all, and he and Lindsay get married and start thinking about kids. Gavin starts dating a girl named Meg, and she fits in perfectly with their lives, and doesn’t look at them any differently despite her being human and Gavin, Michael, and Lindsay being hybrids. She’s Lindsay’s best friend, and so much like Michael, it’s kind of scary. They become a family: their little family of four hidden in the giant found-family that was put together by Rooster Teeth.

He has the best job and the best friends. He absolutely loves everything in his life. It’s astounding how right everything had gone. So it was time for something to go wrong.

Stupid fucking drunk driver. 

After a while in the crushed tin can of the car, he almost doesn’t hurt anymore. He can’t move his head to see, but he’s pretty sure Lindsay is dead. She was driving, after all. The car hit her dead on. But he, on the other side of the car, is dying too. He calls out for a moment, for Gavin or Meg, but everything gets so blurry and eventually fades into the dark.

In that heap of metal, next to his dead wife, he slides from that life into the next.

~

Michael is ducked down behind a crate in the middle of a warehouse, hearing bullets fly overhead and waiting for the tell-tale sound of a chopper to let him know the cavalry had arrived. 

He thinks that this is his best life yet.

The thunk-thunk sound of blades of a chopper signals the arrival of the rest of the crew. It had supposed to be an easy pickup to get some more weapons, but his dealer had given some hand signal and goons had come rushing out of the shadows like ants. They had almost surprised him, too, but Michael was used to it.

Outside of the crew, there was never any honesty on the streets.

A novelty horn honked, and Michael popped out from cover, shooting, and shouting at the top of his lungs. His yell of “You messed with the wrong crew, motherfucker!” coincided perfectly with the blasting of the warehouse doors. Geoff and Gavin appeared silhouetted in the daylight and rubble, looking like avenging angels. A terrible, savage grin painted itself on Michael’s face. They were invincible, at least for a little while. With the crew, nothing was impossible.

This life is not really remembered in clarity. Instead, it’s the glint in Gavin’s eye as he shoots a flare, the bright pink of Ray’s sniper rifle, the deep, dark black of Ryan’s mask. It’s the mix of so many emotions it’s impossible to describe, a quilt of pride and savagery and love as he watches Geoff’s empire grow. It was just him, Geoff, Jack, Ray, Ryan, and Gavin; but then there was the B-Team, and then there were the new hires, and everything was perfect. The Fake AH Crew ruled the city.

It struck him, every now and then. A feeling deep in his chest when Ryan stayed up for days on end, when Ray left, when Gavin said: “You’re my boi, Michael!”, when Geoff drank, when Jeremy seemed nervous, or when Jack had those worry lines around her eyes. A feeling of complete love and thankfulness and melancholy and nostalgia. He would find these people in every lifetime, in every story. They were his.

This isn’t the first life that Michael has been a criminal, but this is the first life that Michael’s been a criminal and survived. This life started out like many others: born to a poor family in New Jersey, left town because of the cops, and started making explosives in a warehouse somewhere outside of Los Santos. But then he met Geoff and Jack and Gavin, and then brought in Ray and Ryan, and then there were Lindsay and Matt and Jeremy and Kdin - so many others. An empire.

Michael has never expected it to last. So when he stares at the line of cops on the other side of the bridge and then looks down into the water below, Gavin at his side, the rest of the crew’s voices in his ear, he smiles. Michael had almost predicted it. He can barely hear the sirens and screams over the whipping wind, standing on the side of the bridge and looking down into the rocky waters below. He grabs blindly for Gavin’s hand and grasps it just as they leap.

Staring up through the water at the fading light, feeling Gavin thrash next to him, pulling him up to air, he fades from this life into the next.

~

Michael can never tell if this life is his first of his last, but it is the one he always comes back to. Laying beside his beautiful wife at night, he can’t imagine anything different. He’s had so many lives - and this one is his favorite out of all his favorites.

He thinks about all his experiences in this life: his time as an electrician, his move to Texas, his years at Rooster Teeth, and all his amazing friends. He never experiences anything like this in any of his other lives. It’s amazing how perfect everything can be.

He walks into work with kolaches. He’s planning on getting Ryan to eat at least half of them. He’ll film videos all day with his favorite people: Geoff, Jack, Ryan, Gavin, Jeremy, Mica, and Matt. Later tonight he will meet up with Gavin, Lindsay, and Meg. He will live out today the same as he lives every day, knowing -

This is it. These are his people. He’s going to find them in every lifetime, in every memory.


End file.
